Amazon has announced new AI tools, including a program for building more conversational customer service agents, such as a healthcare system for generating clinical data after a patient visit, a report has said. The tools are expected to help the e-commerce giant to better compete with Google and Microsoft cloud business, which helped either the tech companies post positive numbers this week.According to a report by news agency Reuters, Amazon’s cloud division attracted thousands of customers to try out its service called Amazon Bedrock. These previously unreported companies include Sony, airline Ryanair and financial services company Sun Life, vice president Swami Sivasubramanian was quoted as saying.

Amazon announced Bedrock service in April that lets businesses create applications with a range of AI models that can produce text, images and other content on input. "Our mission is to make every company an AI company," said Sivasubramanian. The company said it was adding Agents for Amazon Bedrock, which lets businesses create chatbots that execute tasks and give more personalised answers drawing from their in-house data. The company also said that it has a range of AI models on offer. Amazon Bedrock will become available generally to any customer very "soon," Sivasubramanian said.

Both Microsoft and Google have made inroads in the AI space. Microsoft invested in OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT and the AI model called GPT-4. Google announced the PaLM 2 model in four sizes, from smallest to largest: Gecko, Otter, Bison and Unicorn, and it also offers Bard AI chatbot. 

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently said that the company is ‘in the lead’ with new cloud-based AI workloads. “If you think about Azure, we have grown Azure over the years, coming from behind, and here we are as a strong No. 2 in the lead when it comes to these new workloads,” he said.

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai also claimed that AI companies are choosing Google’s cloud technology over competition to run the compute-heavy projects. He said that more than 70% of unicorns in generative AI are Google Cloud customers. “There is definitely a lot of interest from customers on AI and they definitely are engaging on many more conversations with us,” Pichai said. Google’s cloud business saw revenue increase 28% in the second quarter to $8 billion.